Slashdot Mirror
Red Hat 8.0 Released
I_am_Rambi writes "RedHat has released their latest OS, 8.0. Here is Red Hat's ftp site for download and some mirrors. If you need help there's a Howto." Jeet81 adds: "Red Hat is out with a new release, Red Hat 8.0. Looks like Red Hat is moving towards the windows XP style using its new Bluecurve graphical interface (the new default email client 'Ximian Evolution' looks a lot like MS Outlook)." So what's the verdict on Null or Bluecurve or whatever it's called? Good idea, bad idea?
It seems to me that looking like windows, while not sharing the ease of use of windows isn't exactly what's going to win customers over. That's only half (or less) of the battle. Maybe if this post read...looks and functions like windows xp (which it couldn't have said in good faith), that would be something.
Certainly every man at his best state is but vapor
The first question is: is unifying desktops via theming a good idea. The answer is an emphatic yes, but with the proviso that it's a damn hard thing to do well, and you have to deal with the egos of everyone involved (including your own).
The second question is: did Red Hat pull it off well. I think we will have to wait a few months to guage how successful it has been. Ximian's Gnome2-based system will almost certianly be out soon, and I think a good measure of how usable Red Hat's desktop is will be how many people plunk Ximian down over it.
Poor slashdot. If they break a new release story right away they get flamed for causing people to slam the vendor's ftp site before the mirrors have a chance to get it, if they wait a few days and allow mirrors to get updated first, they get flamed for posting a story which is "old news."
Anyway, I had to completely remove my .kde directory, then restarting brought up everything 'new', and it looks nice.
This is the correct behavior for an upgrade. It would really suck if an OS upgrade wiped out your existing configs and preferrences, wouldn't it?
Suppose you had a server with a couple hundred users on it. Over the weekend you upgrade the OS and it resets everyone's desktops and configs. Would you like to be in the support chair on Monday morning?
I don't know why all you guys seem think Kazaalite and BearShare are for MP3s... They're for downloading RedHat ISO's, silly!
-David
We're on the road to Tycho.
How exactly is the behavior you are complaining about -- inaccuracies in headline and submitter comments and delayed coverage of old news -- atypical for Slashdot? One might argue that they are very much old hat for regular readers.
More to the point, you're wrong about many of the 'issues' you raise. Point two, that it is called (null) instead of null, is just being pedantic, and I am quite skeptical regarding its accuracy.
If one were inclined to pick nits, one might observe that the theme is Bluecurve, not "Blue Curve", but I'm feeling generous and so I'll let it pass.
And finally, in case you missed it, there was a story about Red Hat 8.0 on Monday, when it was released. I have no idea why there's another one, but the story was reported as news when it actually was news, and here it is again.
One of the joys of Slashdot is that over the days and months and years, you see familiar stories reappear and can recapture the joy you felt when reading them initially. The main page is like an endless parade of friendly faces, each one smiling and saying, "It's been a while. Take a break, read me again, let's catch up."
I have always believed that this happens because the editors firmly believe, like Faulkner before them, that there are truly no new stories. In the vast span of human existence, tales of greed and altruism, life and death, nobility and depravity, wonder and Red Hat point releases, have all been played out countless times in the same familiar manner. Only the faces change. To my mind this is a very humanistic sentiment, and I cherish those editors who recognize this fundamental truth of our existence.
Kudos to you, Slashdot staff!
2.4.18... what's up with that. I guess it's been in testing too long. Actually, for a X.0 release things look pretty good.
The included kernel is by no means a stock 2.4.18. There's a ton of patches and tweaks applied (all available separeately in the kernel SRPMs'). For example the system clock ticks 5 times faster than the stock one, giving much better responsiveness in for example X (see the release notes on for more information). Large parts of Alan Cox's ac-kernel tree is part of the RH kernel (Alan is employed by RH you know). I know of no distribution that would ship a stock kernel.
Apache 2.0+PHP problem is a show stopper for me. Wiped the machine and installed Mandrake 9.0. Sad since 8 is very slick. Hats off (pun intended) to Redhat for a great release. I may come back to it if I can get the PHP stuff resolved.
All recent version of PHP have deprecated the REGISTER_GLOBALS option (and good riddance!). This is most likely what is causing your problems, poorly written scripts will no longer run on recent PHP's.
I was lucky enough to snag the first 4 cd's over the weekend, so I've been playing with 8.0 for a few days now.
I had the beta release null installed on a box last week that I had tried too.
Anyway, as for 8.0,
likes:
- the interface. switching between KDE and GNOME doesn't cause others looking at the desktop to be totally mystified. they both look similar, and it's been a long time coming that Redhat should've done this.
- mozilla. it's come a long way, and its turning into quite a browser.
- it installed nicely on all but one box - it didn't recognize the soundcard on a dell optiplex gx1p. running sndconfig manually after the install fixed that right up.
dislikes:
- no direct way to mount a win32 share from the desktop. Yes, I can start Konq and smb://somemachine, but can I right-click and mount it? Nope.
- no 'run' interface like win32. sorry, but I can window-key-R and type \\machine\sharename
and I'm there. Can't do that with RH.
- xmms has mp3 play-ability removed. Fine, goto http://psyche.freshrpms.net/ and grab the rpm so it can play mp3's.
- dvd playback (mpg, avi, etc) - again, gotta go get more rpm's from freshrpms because default redhat8 doesn't have the capability.
Now, I realize that before the latest Win32 OS's came out, you had to go get an mp3 player. And most people, even though Windows XP can play them out of the box now, they probably go get winamp. (I do). So can I really bitch about redhat not playing mp3's out of the box?
Sure I can. In my opinion, Redhat could atleast buy the license to include this stuff, so that if I purchase the boxed set, and install it, that would have the capability built in. I can understand they don't want to pay for the people who are downloading the iso's for free.
I also came to the realization that even though all the apps have the same look and feel, running KDE apps under GNOME, or vise versa, doesn't always play nicely. Example: I like Kmail (specifically because of the filters, and it acts like Eudora). Anyway, I ran it under GNOME. It tried to view a jpg attachment someone sent by clicking on it, and it didn't happen. Switched to KDE (which I normally use 99% of the time) went to kmail, clicked on the attachment... bingo, it came right up.
Yes, there's probably a fix for this. But I'm sorry, I'm getting tired of having to tinker to get each linux box to act uniformally all the time. Between the two here at work, the 2 at home, and the dual boot laptop, it can take a lot of time tinkering with things to get them to work. Hopefully, w/ each release of redhat this will become less and less of an issue.
Anyway, just my $.02....
tf23
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
Hm, a nicer UI, eh? Looking at http://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/contrib /texstar/screenshots/redhat80/snapshot03.jpg, we have
/Center/ if all the knobs and tweaks are already available elsewhere?
- preferences, *and*
- server settings, *and*
- system tools, *and*
- system settings, *and*
- control center, *and*
- configure panel.
And you think it should be immediately obvious from these items, that appear in a completely unsorted and ungrouped menu, what they mean and what the distinction is? I must admit the theme looks surprisingly friendly (if not soft), but seriously, this is painful, if not patently absurd.
Is it really necessary to make a difference between Preferences, System Settings, and a Control Center? Between System Settings and Server Settings? And is there any reason why all these should live outside the Control Center? Is there any reason at all to have a Control
Make up your mind I'd say. If you *desparately* want to supply more than one configuration item, reduce it to 'Personal Preferences' and 'System Settings', a distinction which at least has some meaning for people who already know that different people can use the computer each in their own way, but that some people may control the computer's overall behaviour as well.
The mixing of verbs and nouns in the same list is also horribly confusing. The submenus should get their own group and the rest should be *verbs*, if you want to give the user any feel of predictability at all (*Launch* Control Center. *Get* Help. *Open* Home folder). Or go the other way, with an implicit Start, Launch or Open everywhere, but then please be consistent and call 'Find Files' the 'Search Tool'.
Come on guys, I'm also a C programmer instead of a UI designer, but is it really so hard to avoid making a mess? No wonder even geeks are switching to Macs these days.
All generalizations are false, including this one. (Mark Twain)
People bitch when /. posts releases the moment that they hit the main server and before the propegate, and then people bitch when they give the mirrors time to be ready for the /. onslaught.
Really, dig your panties out of your ass and understand that waiting a couple of days for the servers to get the new release is a Good Thing.